


Like to a Little Kingdom

by shakespearespaz



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 04:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1027478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakespearespaz/pseuds/shakespearespaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little exploration of Rachel and Bass</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like to a Little Kingdom

He watched her while she read, long limbs tucked beneath her, blue orbs darting up occasionally to scour him. Her cold gazes wouldn’t get him to leave, couldn’t make him scurry away like his ego was bruised. He owned the room she lived in, the building, the compound. Hell, the entire city was his, and so was she.

She was a snake caged, cool and subdued until she bared her teeth with a fountain pen or shard of broken mirror or simply her fingernails. He couldn’t be touched by her though, scratches would heal and she wasn’t a fighter. She learned when she could push him and when to fear him. Closing his fingers around her wrist was an easy way to make the beast wary; he’d snapped the same wrist twice before and wasn’t afraid to do so again.

He’d given up on answers long ago, or at least until he found better leverage than her own injury. She didn’t care about her life and he knew that hope was the cruelest thing that he could give her.

So he’d come to her during the day, fling open the curtains to drench her in blinding sunlight and lie to her. About Ben and the children and names and faces he remembered from a rapidly fading past. He’d promise her that she could be reunited with them, that they’d found them safe and sound and happy. Sometimes he’d use Miles at his expense and watched her struggle, pieces of the most enigmatic relationship he knew flashing across her pale face. But he’d never found Miles; Rachel would know when he truly did.

She indulged though and let herself imagine she might leave, might find a tenuous peace after years of the same creaking floorboards.

And he knew she dreamed, so he’d come to her in the inky nights and take what he could away. His disembodied voice would remind her that she was property of the Monroe Republic, that no one knew she was alive and no one was coming to help her. Her limbo would last forever, he promised her as his hands drifted across her struggling form. And she was helpless he told her, so why resist him so?

He chipped away at her, muddled her brain and strengthened her resolve, but he never broke her. Even when the façade crumbled and he crept in the shadows to find her grey lump beneath the covers trembling with long withheld tears, he’d find her eyes clear and stubborn in the morning. If she knew he saw her when the grief consumed, she never acknowledged it. He would never touch her then, not when she might need it most.

She was never his; her body and mind were at his mercy daily, but her spirit or heart, or whatever a religion Monroe had never believed in might have called it, was never his. She had regarded Miles in too many hazy memories with smiling eyes and let slender fingers linger over an old sheet he’d unearthed that Miles had composed and meant to relay to her via whatever crude post-Blackout means he could. She loved him despite everything and Miles’ ancient fumbling words meant more to her than Monroe’s games ever could.

The hate and desire that squeezed at him helped no one and her approval was worthless. He got more satisfaction from letting the healthy red glow of the fire turn the letter to ash before her face.

He dreamed of heavy, hot blood dripping from her fingers, plopping against his skin in the empty room he called his home. He awoke to have her shackled safely in the basement cell for a time, where all that would threaten his sleep was her own blood dried with caked dirt. Once his fears had faded, he’d personally wash the grime and grease away to rediscover the curly, golden mane; she’d given up fighting his bulky hands, as it only earned her a vicious dunk beneath murky bath water.

He’d lost too much to let her go. As long as she was there, he still had control, still had one person who would not leave him, one person to remind him of what he was and hate him for it.

Her pain dulled his and it felt right and just to take what he wanted and not look back.

\--

She had no obligation to make him see, he had steered far past the point of salvation, but his blindness made rusty fears clench at her.

Like old times he paused as he passed his leather glove over her cheek. How could one person bite their tongue for so long? He was an idiot, a cruel and worthless sadist to ignore the pain that had grown inside her every hour of every day since her eyes had fluttered open to find Miles gone and Monroe standing by her bedside like a grieved family member.

The loneliness that split her, the helplessness that ate her from the inside, he was the cause of it all. He’d taken her apart piece by piece and could not even see now that all she wanted was a reprieve.

How could he understand that every moment she didn’t spent in her failed reality she found herself back in his cage, his inescapable labyrinth that still haunted her from hundreds of miles away? He couldn’t understand and she had no need for him to.

All he needed to do was die, so that her spinning brain and swollen, bruised heart might finally rest.

But she couldn’t manage that, instead his eyes bore into her with the same anticipation and possession that he always had. She had no energy to fight back, she had barely enough left to pull the pin on the grenade. She could stand tall and proud as he chained her to herself, but resisted pointlessly against his hand wrapped around hers and his body smothering and forcing her like always.

She wanted physical contact, had craved it since she’d stood under a sky of cold stars again. Miles had worshipped, communicating nothing with speech but everything in patterns he traced across her tired skin, exhaling in surprise at her welcoming mass in his arms.

Bass obsessed, far more effective than his clumsy counterpart at opening every gaping wound without a single touch. Her disgust was nothing to him but fuel, her terror victory in his eyes.

He said he knew that blood was on his hands, but he showed no shame at wrapping those hands around her and clenching tightly.

Willoughby wasn’t safe, had never been safe for Rachel. The walls made good show of it, but even in their shadows her own worst enemy was herself, the guilt and screams and helplessness. Helpless beneath a captor’s icy fingertips, helpless as her own son shook with each impacting bullet, helpless as thousands of live flattened in a fragment of a second.

And then he was there again and she felt it slip; the panic shattered in pointed daggers against misplaced targets.


End file.
